Some questions

Some questions. – To poetize in the face of the planet’s becoming uninhabitable seems intolerable. What do we say when confronted with a dying earth? What, in other words, is loveable and desirable about this earth? Is the loveability of this planet, this earthly life, to be equated with the inhabitability of the planet?

These questions are not incorporated if we stay on the level of hoping that poetry, through its devices and metaphors, will beautify and thereby make this earth more significant and tolerable. Our poesy must come to terms with a dying earth, that is, it must come to terms with a dying language that is capable of beautifying the planet. If our language becomes ugly and inhospitable, we must recognize, or be able to recognize, when it is still a language that is most fitting for the occasion. If the occasion is a nihilistic one, we must ask whether our words, our phrases, are true to this scenario or whether, once again, we are attempting to veil our planetary woes in a beautifying symbolism. Of course, the question still weighs on us: what is the marker that our language has become less capable of living with the devastation of the planet? Will we become less impressed by the language that tries to express the monstrous loss the poets are undergoing, as members of the species? Will language, its phrases, its fitting words, its cadences, become uglier and uglier as our planet’s hospitable places rot?